Afghanistan: bombings kill at least 21

A series of bombings reportedly killed at least 21 people in Afghanistan Saturday.

A suicide bomber in the central province of Ghazni pushed an ice cream cart before blowing himself up and killing at least one child, witnesses told the Associated Press.

"The suicide attacker was a young man with a thin beard and mustache wearing a scarf," a witness named Asadullah said. "He was pushing an ice cream cart. I was standing just 20 meters from him and then he exploded."

In another attack, a Taliban bomb killed 16 members of one family, the Telegraph reports.

The bomb hit the family's minivan as they drove to a shrine in southern Afghanistan's Kandahar province. The dead included eight children.

Violence in Afghanistan has been on the rise over the past few months in what has been called a spring offensive.

A U.N. report showed that this May was the deadliest month for civilians since 2007, the Associated Press reports.

The report found that insurgent attacks caused most of the month's civilian deaths. It states that 368 civilians were killed in May. The previous deadliest month was August 2008 when 341 civilians were killed.

“We are very concerned that civilian suffering will increase even more over the summer fighting season which historically brings the highest numbers of civilian casualties," Georgette Gagnon, director of human rights for the UN in Afghanistan, told the Telegraph.

Another attack Saturday reportedly killed a senior police official outside a police station in Khost along with three other people.